Positively Gorgeous!

One of the things I truly appreciate about having MS is that it taught me there is not enough time in the world, to indulge in negative thinking.  And an indulgence it is!

I am not talking about feeling depressed, that is something altogether different and something that should start with a trip to your doctor if feeling down goes longer than a few days.

I am talking about the kind of people that see the darker side of the equation every time, who prefer to be right about unpleasant happenings, than being right about the good stuff in life. Mostly it is not their fault, because “what you don’t know, you don’t know”.  They don’t know they are like this.

Think about your average office metrics.

We measure failure to reach goals and give it at a higher priority than celebrating success. We look at how many high severity problems we had, rather than how much time we had untroubled by issues. We spend all of our energy trying to minimise bad, without thinking about how much more engaging and pleasant it would be to spend that energy on increasing the good.

This negative environment gives the worker the message that it not only OK to be negative, but you need to be GOOD at being negative to get ahead…. what kind of crappy nonsense is that?!

If the office worked to improve to positive standards in the end the results will be exactly the same, but the mindset of those working to reach those targets, will be completely different.

How we think should be a conscious decision rather than a consequence of just existing. Living means taking an active part in molding who you are and how you think.

If you have read this far then I am going to hit you with this statement You are no longer permitted to be indulgently negative as you now know that this is a choice you are making.

I am not going to tell you to stop being negative, I am going to tell you to notice the times things are positive. When things are going well, pause for just a second or two and indulge in FEELING GOOD.  Smile and congratulate yourself that you remembered to do this, and think about other feel-good times.

It may feel weird in the beginning, and you may need to move the feelings from your right brain to the left by writing them down. However you get to be “in the moment” with that feeling is OK; pinch yourself to notice, count the smiles, list, record, count….but NOTICE!

Soon enough you will start applying those feelings to new events. Appreciation of others, gratitude in general, and being part of the whole, rather than an individual, will become more common in your daily routine. You don’t lose who you are, you expand to be more than that island battling against the odds.

You lose nothing by changing this mindset, but you gain so much

Managing a Four Hour Work Week

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, or check out the distractions section of this blog, will know already that today was the first day of my being outsourced to AT&T from IBM.

My role in AT&T will be managing a team of about 24 people. Almost twice as big as the team I managed before.  This will mean I need to  lay the ground rules early to ensure no-one is wasting my time or theirs. Some classics from Tim Ferriss will be implemented as office policy.

The issue that many people have trying to work the 4HWW is that their manager is stuck in what I call the “Way of the Cubicle“. The Way of the Cubicle is the ancient art of believing that you are most productive at your desk, phone glued to one ear, typing on a keyboard with one hand and shoving your lunch in your gob with the other. Way of the Cubicle devotees are often late middle aged, who seek ways of proving that you, their minion, are doing “work”.

An example that was passed on to me by a friend was their Way of The Cubicle boss not being a big fan of work-from-home type arrangements. He was paranoid that all that would happen is the worker would watch Oprah all day and basically bugger about doing nothing. So he proposed (as they were all programmers) that he would write a program that would take a screenshot of the worker’s screen randomly,  several times an hour.

It might be just me, but doesn’t that just smack of wasted productivity doing something like that?

Anyway back to the office where I am the boss. The new “rules” that I will be implementing are

• Meetings are a last resort
• If you cannot avoid convening a meeting ensure the agenda with planned outcomes is in the invitation or I will not accept
• Meetings should be between 1pm and 3pm
• All staff will block out lunch time and eat somewhere away from the desk/floor

My last team were technical implementors and so I abolished strict starting and finishing times and allowed the team to set them themselves. Unfortunately my new team are a couple of operational support teams that have specific hours and SLAs to meet so I can’t really allow that.

I can however, empower the team to start making decisions that they have not been permitted to in the past.

The goal of all this is to actually keep my team away form me while I do the mundane work that needs to be done without interruption and thinking/strategy time.

More on this subject after implementation.